Xref: utzoo rec.humor:18695 rec.humor.d:1596 comp.misc:5013 Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!julian!uwovax!brent From: brent@uwovax.uwo.ca (Brent Sterner) Newsgroups: rec.humor,rec.humor.d,comp.misc Subject: Re: Looking for Computer Folklore Message-ID: <1583@uwovax.uwo.ca> Date: 9 Feb 89 16:37:05 GMT References: <744@utkcs2.cs.utk.edu> <6286@saturn.ucsc.edu> <1582@uwovax.uwo.ca> Lines: 19 Organisation: University of Western Ontario, Canada A caper which preceeded my employment at this site (and that is a *long* time ago :-) involved on of the first PDP-10 systems ever shipped. (I have trouble remembering if it was serial number 8 or 10, octal or decimal.) The time frame was 1967 or so... Those early PDP-10 systems required assembly and linking of the OS, and deliberate software switch setting to enable certain "features". One release of the OS had a new feature, called "swapping". Hackers have been around a long time. There was a rather strong desire to test this new feature. Problem was, there was no disk available to try it out on. Or was there... Next to the PDP-10 sat an IBM 7040 system. Like the PDP-10 system, it used a 36 bit word. And you guessed it. The 7040 was programmed to read and write the data channel assigned to swapping. And it apparently worked. I don't know the authors of this effort. Names of people who might know more include John McHardy, Dave (?) Freedman (?), and/ or Dave Ellwood. I'd very much like to get this story straight, so if anyone knows the whereabouts and can correct the story, it would be appreciated. b.